


this is where I keep you in my mind

by firstaudrina



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Pre series, but it catches up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-27
Updated: 2019-11-27
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:01:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21584206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina
Summary: Gretel is Maia's first real friend in New York. Gretel gives Maia her life back.
Relationships: Gretel & Maia Roberts
Comments: 10
Kudos: 21





	this is where I keep you in my mind

Maia is eighteen years old when she turns up at the Jade Wolf, lonely and angry, her body all at odds like a misshapen umbrella from five hours on public transport. She has two duffles and a black garbage bag that she’s been lugging from station to station all the way from Ocean City. She has her pillow under her arm, still in its purple and yellow check pillowcase. She only brought clothes and books with her. She has four hundred and eighty-three dollars to her name. There is a defiant jut to her jaw when she tells Luke, “You said if I ever needed anything…”

She has been a wolf for six months.

Luke sits her down in a booth opposite a slight, spiky girl with silver hair. She raises an eyebrow and doesn’t speak. Luke asks, “Room for one more?”

Two black girls, around the same age. Math checks out. 

Gretel looks Maia up and down for a long moment before she says, “Sure.”

Gretel lives in a studio but it looks more like the inside of someone’s closet, or the back corner of a thrift store. There’s stuff everywhere, but it’s interesting stuff — leather vests and studded jeans, boots with glitter heels, quaint quilted boxes exploding with spools of thread. “I got into FIT,” she says proudly, when she sees Maia’s eye land on the sewing machine. “But then, you know.” She makes growly hands. “It’s actually really useful to know how to sew, for us.”

“Yeah.” Maia lost a few favorites to the travails of turning unexpectedly. “I can see that.”

“Make yourself at home.” She shoves a pile of clothes off one end of the fold-out couch. “I gotta go to work, are you gonna be okay?”

“Yeah,” Maia says again, automatically. She’s always okay. But Gretel just looks at her for a moment, a too-close kind of look, and shakes her head. 

“No, yeah,” she says. “You’re coming with me.”

Gretel is a waitress (“Server, hel _lo_.”) at a French restaurant in the city. She plops Maia — unshowered, exhausted, still in yesterday’s clothes — down at the end of the bar with a menu before she goes to get her apron. Maia’s eyes swim, unseeing. She hadn’t brought her phone with her when she left, but she wouldn’t have any missed calls from her parents if she had.

Her flight hadn’t been planned but wasn’t exactly un-impulsive either. She’d been saving, money tucked between box spring and mattress. She got through shifts at her shitty movie theater job by fantasizing about getting the hell out of there before it ate her alive. She went to the main office at school to get her diploma ahead of time so she wouldn’t have to be at graduation. She never picked up her yearbook. She didn’t need to see that. Maia Roberts, girl most likely to get left in the dirt. 

She didn’t have the day circled on her calendar. She didn’t have tickets bought and paid for. She saved as much as she could, but in the end it didn’t matter, because she just had to leave. She couldn’t sit in that silent house a minute longer. She couldn’t stand one more set of eyes on her neck. So she called in a favor from the one friend she sort of had left and begged a ride to the train station. She climbed out her bedroom window and didn’t look back.

The menu is unexpectedly snatched out of her hands and Maia blinks, eyes wet with tears that stay contained and don’t spill. She holds herself tight as a fist. Gretel sets a bowl of dark French onion soup in front of her, Maia’s empty stomach rumbling eagerly. “I can’t —” She swallows, hard. “I shouldn’t spend money.”

Gretel waves a hand. “It’s on Luke,” she says. “Don’t worry about it.”

Maia’s first night in New York, she has French onion soup and a croque monsieur and tarte tatin. And every few minutes, Gretel checks on her — a glance across the busy room, a squeeze at her elbow, more kindness than anyone has shown Maia in so long.

Gretel gets Maia a job. She says food service has a lot of turnover, so wolves like it, and one of the guys in the pack owns a bar. Could always use bartenders. Maia has never shaken or stirred anything before — she was a camp counselor; she worked at the mall; she volunteered for free at the library; she sold movie tickets — but she’s quick on her feet. Always has been. 

Gretel brings Maia fries from the restaurant after her shifts. She clears off a shelf in the cluttered living room for Maia’s novels, the only touch of sentimentality she’d allowed herself. _Beloved. Jane Eyre. Kindred. Great Expectations_. She touches their spines at night when she can’t sleep and when that doesn’t work, she puts _Jane Eyre_ under her pillow. Those musty, fragile pages smell like home, somehow. Maia doesn’t really have a home.

Gretel keeps weird hours and she can’t cook, but Maia can. She always cooked for herself after Daniel died and her mother lost whatever spark she had. Dad worked long hours, gone before Maia woke up and staggering home after dark. So it was often her at the stove by herself, learning to make all the foods she liked. Gretel thinks this is incredible.

Food is a big part of their relationship. Wolves eat a lot, their bodies burning energy twenty-four seven. Maia makes big dinners, fills the small room with fragrant herbs and warmth. Gretel, delighted, announces, “I love having a wife.”

They watch _The Great British Bake Off_ and Gretel takes it as a challenge, demanding choux pastry and mille-feuille, biscuits and tarts. A funny thing starts to happen. Somewhere in all the powdered sugar and soggy pastry, the fire alarm that goes off at three a.m. when Maia absolutely _destroys_ a sheet of croissants, that tightness in her chest begins to ease. Gretel laughs so much. She sticks her finger into bowls of batter like an unmannered monster, she eats burnt caramel, she gives Maia con-crit in a bad British accent. She tries so hard to be fun because she can see that Maia is miserable, and because of that Maia doesn’t feel so miserable. 

Sometimes she laughs, too. 

“I think you’d look really cute with shorter hair,” Gretel says. She stands behind Maia in the bathroom mirror and twists Maia’s hair up. “Don’t you think?”

Maia has hidden her neck under her long, long hair for months. Even though she can’t stand the touch of it on her skin anymore — can hear Jordan say _I love your hair_ , can feel his fingers knotted up in her curls — she needs it like a security blanket to keep her safe.

Gretel sweeps it to the side now so the marks on Maia’s neck are on full display. She meets Maia’s eyes, her own dark and serious. “I mean it,” she says.

Maia cuts her hair.

Gretel’s wolf marks are ragged Morse code on her side, deep gouges and slashes marring the skin right below her ribcage, the soft flesh of her stomach. There’s a slight ripple to the skin, almost like a burn. “Took a real chunk out of me,” she sighs. “Two years ago, now.”

Gretel’s mother was a wolf, but she’d grown up mundane, like her dad; it hadn’t passed on. It had been kind of fun as a kid, the way she tells it. She knew she had a Wolf Mommy who went on a little trip every month with her friends, where they took off upstate and howled at the moon. When she was naughty, her parents would tease her, tell her that Wolf Mommy was gonna get her while they tickled her sides. Her friends’ parents had weird hobbies, took trips. It didn’t seem that different to Gretel.

But when her dad died, her mom kind of lost it. Gretel got caught in the crossfire. 

“I can’t tell you how bad she feels,” Gretel says, almost apologetic. “It was really hard, for a while. Still is. But after my dad…” She clears her throat. “I couldn’t lose her, too. So it’s fine. It’s gonna be fine.” She makes herself brighten. “I can be Wolf Mommy one day.”

It makes Maia’s heart hurt. Gretel’s bright, brittle optimism. 

Luke is the only person Maia has ever told the truth about her turning to, but she tells Gretel that night. They sit on the couch facing each other, leftover fries between them and wine open on the coffee table. Gretel is the second person to get the bare facts of the story — ex-boyfriend, sudden attack, left for dead — but the first person to get the details Maia doesn’t like to say out loud.

Like, _I loved him_. Like, _I miss him_. Like, _I hate him_.

Gretel says, “I get it, but fuck him.”

Gretel says, “You’re better off.”

Gretel says, “I love you.”

And it’s not until then that Maia realizes she needed to hear that.

Maia moves out of the studio eventually, but Gretel comes with her. First there’s the one-bedroom they cheat into two, that has a mouse problem that sends them — two fully grown werewolves — shrieking onto the kitchen chairs at least once a week. Then there’s a real two-bedroom in a nowheresville part of Brooklyn, the first place where Maia puts paint on the walls and buys her own furniture. Gretel takes classes at Parsons when Maia pushes her. They write papers side by side at their rickety kitchen table. They go to pack meetings. Gretel refuses to read good books, but she always gets extra fries.

Maia’s cleaning up broken glass at the bar — put a Shadowhunter through a window, they sure make a mess — when her phone rings. She knows something is wrong as soon as she hears Luke’s voice on the other end, because it’s the same one he used when he first found Maia. Firm, but empathetic. A trained kind of sympathy that isn’t exactly personal, but hurts less for the same reason. Gretel has been missing for more than a day. The Circle doesn’t leave wolves alive.

“Are you sitting?” Luke asks, but Maia has been hurt enough times that she knows how to stand. She’s straight-backed in the wreckage of the bar, phone in her numb fingers, looking out through the gaping hole where the window used to be. And she feels so many things that she doesn’t feel anything at all.


End file.
